Imagine Dua Lipa releasing an album of Victorian parlour ballads

This is unexpected. A bright young cellist – one of the brightest, in fact – makes his recorded debut with a collection of opera fantasies. In the 19th century, touring virtuosos routinely ransacked hit operas for melodies, then decked them out with every conceivable bit of flummery, dazzlement and top-end-tinsel, the better to excite their fans. They were wildly popular. The young Wagner spent a miserable few months in Paris compiling opera fantasies for cash in hand. The process basically radicalised him.

Nowadays, there’s no less fashionable genre, and for the excellent 26-year-old American cellist Zlatomir Fung to record a whole disc of the silly things – well, it’s as if Dua Lipa had suddenly released an album of Victorian parlour ballads. Irresistible, in other words, and as well as authentic 19th-century fantasies on La fille du régiment, Eugene Onegin and William Tell, Fung has even composed his own fantasy on Jenufa which you expect will be a parody but actually teases out Janacek’s fevered melancholy rather well.

A brand new Carmen fantasy by Marshall Estrin adds a faintly loopy vocal commentary – apparently, this isn’t really an opera fantasy but a commentary on opera fantasies. Whatever: it certainly sounds like the genuine high-camp article. The main problem, perverse as it sounds, is that Fung (along with his pianist Richard Fu) simply plays too beautifully. This is music as tightrope act: you need to believe that the soloist might genuinely plummet to their doom. Fung dances elegantly over all the insanely difficult pyrotechnics and generally makes it sound far too easy. It needs less charm, more chutzpah.